VARUS – is a national supermarket chain owned by the “Omega” company and has been operating in the Ukrainian grocery retail market since 2003. The chain consists of 115 supermarkets in various cities of Ukraine and a DarkStore in Kyiv, offering 21,900 product items on a total sales area of 95,189.41 m2. VARUS employs 7,500 staff members, and the network itself is represented in several formats: classic supermarkets, To Go stores, and the conscious shopping service VARUS.UA.
In Brief
The VARUS.UA team approached Wise IT with a request to implement intelligent product search for users of the VARUS online marketplace that would allow the use of natural language.
Wise IT specialists, in collaboration with Data Science partners !FESTCloud.ai, developed and implemented a GenAI-based solution for search in the VARUS online marketplace. The project integrated Gemini LLM, which made it possible to simplify natural language search.
Business Challenge
Traditional search on the VARUS website forced customers to communicate in “catalog language,” searching for specific SKUs (e.g., “beetroot”, “cabbage”). The main challenge was to teach the marketplace to understand the client from the search context and reduce the cognitive load on the buyer.
VARUS aimed to change the search paradigm: moving from individual product queries to searching by “life scenarios.” The main task was to enable customers to search for products using natural language, using queries like “planning a party with friends” or “breakfast for the family.”
Expected Result:
- Conversion rate increase due to search relevant to real tasks.
- Average check increase due to displaying a full set of goods for a specific need (e.g., all ingredients for a dish).
Solution
To “teach” the marketplace to understand human language, the Wise IT and !FESTCloud.ai team integrated Vertex AI into the VARUS.UA search logic. At the core of the architecture, Gemini acts as the intelligent interpreter. The developed tool analyzes the “life scenario” request (e.g., “party with friends”) and converts it into a structured list of relevant SKUs, which is then processed by the site’s existing search engine. After a successful Proof of Concept (PoC), the solution was implemented. Final testing confirmed that such a solution is not only effective but also economically viable (moderate cost) for this task.
About Vertex AI
Vertex AI is a unified artificial intelligence platform from Google Cloud designed for developing, deploying, and scaling machine learning models (MLOps). It provides business with a single environment for managing the full lifecycle of AI projects.
The platform provides access to Google’s state-of-the-art “foundation models,” including the Gemini family, as well as tools for their fine-tuning, evaluation, and secure integration.
In this project, Vertex AI acted as the technological core, allowing Wise IT and !FESTCloud.ai to build a custom, reliable, and cost-effective solution directly integrated into the business logic of VARUS.UA.
Result
The solution was successfully launched for all users of the VARUS.UA marketplace. The implementation of AI search proved its economic efficiency and was positively received by customers:
- Popularity: 35% of search users have already chosen the new AI format. The usage share grew from 15% to 35% in 2 months.
- Purchase relevance: The average value of a product found through AI search is 23% higher (130 UAH vs 106 UAH in regular search). This indicates that AI leads to more conscious purchases.
- Average check growth: The average check containing products found through AI is 18% higher. AI doesn’t just help find what’s needed, but also increases the overall value of the order.
Client Testimonial
“It was important to make the search not smarter, but more human. So that it hears the context, mood, need. Now our clients can search the way they speak in life — and it feels like a breath of fresh air :).”
— Oleh Spirin, CEO, VARUS.UA
About Wise IT
Wise IT is a leading Ukrainian IT integrator providing a full range of services: from complex IT audits and building various types of IT infrastructure to virtualization, improving cybersecurity levels, software licensing, and many other tasks.
About !FESTCloud.ai
!FESTCloud.ai is the technological direction of the !FEST Holding of Emotions, which combines artificial intelligence, digital tools, and infrastructure solutions to make industrial enterprises, businesses, and innovative projects stronger, more efficient, and technologically independent.
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